


Leaving My Brother Alone

by winchestersinthedrift



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mental Institutions, Sam Hallucinates, s7 au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 01:44:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8470786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchestersinthedrift/pseuds/winchestersinthedrift
Summary: This was my Summergen entry this year, written for a prompt from lennelle: ‘Sam ends up becoming a long-term resident on the psychiatric ward in 7x17′





	

It’s a Tuesday and Sam’s 416th day on the ward. Dean gets there a little before 10, when visiting hours start, and waits out in the parking lot, leaning on the car and scuffing gravel under the toes of his boots. He’s trying to kick the smoking habit he picked up the fourth month Sam was in here, and he’s antsy, ember-hot irritation running under his skin. 

At 10 he goes in, nods to the nurse at reception, and goes down the hall to Sam’s room. Dean’s tried to make it as nice, as familiar and comfortable as he can. There’s a blanket he brought in from the corner of the trunk where several are rolled up tight behind the bullet cases. There’s a couple of photos, one of them and dad when Dean had just started trying to grow a moustache. He hates it but it always makes Sam laugh. Used to, anyway. 

One day he went to the home furnishings section of a giant department store and stood for awhile in the art section, shuffling up and down the aisles, looking. Trying to pick out something that Sam would like. In the end he left and spent four hours back at the motel going through their Google Photo archives. Sam had set it up to upload from both their phones and there were hundreds of pictures, and scans of some older ones. In the morning he went to a printshop and got a photo blown up to poster-size of a lake up in Wyoming where they’d gone for a weekend once a few months before Dad had died. Sam hung it across from the bed - actually hung it, himself, cause it’d been a good day that day, while Dean had watched a little diffidently, arms crossed, worried that Sam didn’t like it. He’s always worried. 

When he does go hunting, he’s more careful, now. One weekend he went down to see Jody and she helped him write up a will using one of those kits from Walmart. There wasn't much stuff in it. The car, a bank account in the Caymans, guns (listed by year and make). Mostly he did it so he could say who should take care of Sam, sign his paperwork, maybe sign the paperwork to get him out of there someday. 

The picture of Wyoming made Sam happy, at least for a second, and he’s glad about that, but trying to make the room nicer for Sam makes him feel like he’s building a shrine to their past, and he hates that, hates that this is where the road maybe ends. Sam’s lived here now longer than he’s lived almost anywhere else, not that Dean lets himself think about that. 

Dean thinks sometimes that in a world made for tv, in a fairy tale, there'd be a different monster on the ward every month, and Sam's brain would fight them down. Instead Sam takes pills and rests his big hands flat on the tables in the common room and if Dean’s chest hurt any more, he thinks it’ll probably kill him. . 

He reads a lot, these days. It's not that he hated reading, before, but life didn't give a lot of time for it. Now it's become a thing, the main thing, maybe, that he and Sam do together. Sometimes they go outside, too, into the grounds of the hospital, but being outside seems to make it worse for Sam sometimes when he can’t really leave, can’t get in the car or walk down the road or go eat steak at a diner. 

Dean goes to second hand shops and buys piles of books: true crime books, serial killer biographies, cold case stuff. He and Sam read them and talk about the cases. It's something Sam can do with his head that doesn't seem to hurt, doesn’t bring Lucifer close in front of Sam’s face or make him whisper any louder into Sam’s ears. Plus it’s kinda like working jobs. Sam thinks he's found evidence that the Zodiac killer was an amateur necromancer. There are piles of books all over the room now, and yellow foolscap notebooks cause that's what Dean happened to grab at the drugstore when Sam asked for paper. 

‘Starting to look like Bobby’s place in here,’ Dean had said once, offhand, and flinched. 

The OT therapist had offered to get Sam a Kindle, but he'd rubbed his palms against the quilt and shook his head. 

‘Touching things helps,’ he’d said. So Dean keeps going to secondhand bookstores. 

 

Now he’s standing in front of the door and raises one hand, knocks on the door and nudges at its base with one toe.

‘Sammy?’

The door swings open and Sam’s sitting up with his legs swung off the side of the bed, holding the foolscap pad and a pen. His head is up and his eyes are fixed on Dean as he comes in, unnervingly wide and expressionless. Unrecognising. Dean’s heart does a shuddering lurch inside his chest.

‘Hey, you ok?’ he says, and touches Sam’s wrist, and it’s unresponsive, iron stiff. Sam’s writing, breathing shallow and fast, and Dean tilts his head to read what Sam’s writing on the paper

_Hello, righteous man._

Dean freezes, slowly uncurls his fingers from a fist and sits on the edge of the bed, beside Sam. He looks at the paper, up to Sam’s face, and Sam has turned his head to keep looking at Dean. Well, something has, something with Sam’s face, looking out through Sam’s eyes. Dean wets his lips and isn’t sure where to look, Sam or the notepad, when he talks. 

‘Whatta you want? Who are you?’

 _Doesn’t matter_ , Sam writes, in handwriting that’s not his. _Someone from the old guard._

Dean tries to think. 

‘You’re not one of Crowley’s.’ 

A long silence, then Sam writes,

_One of Alastair’s._

All the flushed panic drains off, then, and Dean’s cold as water when it’s just about to freeze, tiny ice crystals flicking across its surface. Sam’s still writing. 

_I wasn’t there when you killed him, but I’ve got your brother now and I’m taking him back. All the way back._

Dean looks at Sam’s expressionless face and tries to think. He almost can’t. He doesn’t want to ask it.

‘But Sam’s not - Sam’s safe. He’s safe. He’s fucked up, but he’s with me, he’s - here.’ 

Sam doesn’t write anything, which is worse. They sit for awhile. 

‘When the walls came down -’ Dean begins, and stops. 

_They came all the way down_ , Sam writes. _A path opened up, a conduit. When he screams at night he’s not just remembering, righteous man. We’ve got him again, we’re getting him. He’s halfway here, and soon the walls will go back up and he’ll be on this side. For good._

Dean stands up, walks across the room, and stands facing the wall for a minute. Thinking. Trying to think. 

‘What do you want?’ he asks, again, because that’s what he needs to know, to fix this. He needs to know and then he can figure it out, he’ll find a way to do it, he’ll cut off his arms, he’ll fight a host of angels, he’ll raise the fucking dead. He just needs to know. 

Sam draws a happy face. Dean’s hair rises on his arms. 

_Nothing_ , Sam writes. _Just to watch you watch your brother disappear_.

 

Dean won’t tell Sam at first. He doesn't tell him for eighteen days. He loses eight pounds and spends most of his time cleaning the guns, staring at the concrete wall like maybe it'll tell him what to do. 

On the eighteenth afternoon he tells him. Sam is scared, almost as scared as Dean’s ever seen him. For awhile he just runs his left hand over the front of his shirt, throat to navel. He’s always pale, now, skin long lost its tan, but now he’s almost as white as his tunic. Finally he says, without looking at Dean,

‘Where do you - do you think - where do you think I’d go, at this point. I mean, if I - died.’ 

It takes Dean a minute to catch what he means. 

‘No,’ he says, ‘fuck, Sam, no, don’t you even don’t you ever. Not on the table. I’m gonna figure something out.’ 

Sam cries, for awhile, and after he stops he keeps shuddering for a long time. Dean moves from the chair and sits on the bed, one leg bent up on the mattress so his thigh can press up tight against Sam’s, and Sam holds onto Dean’s forearm till he falls asleep. 

Sam stops talking about his nightmares, after that. Then he stops talking at all. 

 

On the twenty-ninth night Dean goes into town and hooks up with a waitress from the local IHOP who gave him her number a month or so ago. He buys a pack of cigarettes and chain-smokes through them while he drives up to the hospital. At 2 am he stubs the last cigarette out against the pad of his thumb and flicks it across the parking lot. Then he takes a bundle from the back seat and breaks into the access door at the end of Sam's hall.

Some things have to be done under the moon, and this is one. 

When he comes into the room Sam is lying on his back, silent, but his eyes are open, and they fix on Dean and don't leave him. Sam's sweating, cold, and his face is pulled so hard back onto his bones that he seems to have aged twenty years. Hot acid moves at the bottom of Dean's throat. 

‘Sam,’ he tries to say, and has to clear his throat. ‘Sam, hold on. Twenty minutes. I'm comin’.’ 

He unrolls the bundle, sets the copper bowl on the blanket and empties into it the seven little ziploc bags: Job’s Tears, the pons of a frog killed in its sleep, anise and caraway seeds, a coin bearing the figure of Hermes, god of thresholds and passage. Grass from the Cimmerian steppes, where Odysseus entered the Underworld, and a photo of Sam looking into the camera, grinning. Making fun of him, probably. Dean nicks his thumb with his knife and smears blood over the photo, over Sam’s eyes. 

There's no clock in the room this time to count him down, no reek of hellhound in the room, just the low hum of the heating system and the click of the night nurse’s shoes in the hall, walking the 2 am rounds. The books on Bundy stacked on the side table, abandoned when things got bad. Well, when things got worse. 

He takes out his lighter and flicks it, lights the contents of the bowl and sits back on his heels beside the bed. He's so, so scared. It's not last time, he tells himself. He laces his hands behind his head and squeezes, digs his fingernails in, tries to stop his brain from nosediving into pure limbic fear. He looks up the bed at Sam.

‘Coming, Sam,' he says, and swallows the panic clawing up at his throat. 'Time to kill some evil sons o' bitches.’

 

It’s a Wednesday, Sam’s 457th day on the ward.

Jody gets there in the early evening. It’s summer so it’s still light out, and when the doctor opens the door and steps to the side the soft wash of the golden hour is streaming between the slats of the blinds and bathing the room in spotted light. 

They’ve brought another bed in, stuck awkwardly between the couch and a little piled-up outcropping of paperback books. The doctor seems embarrassed. 

‘Usually we’d, of course, give him his own room,’ he says to Jody, ‘but - ah, quite remarkable - as soon as we start to move the, the older Mr Smith, his brother becomes extremely agitated.’

‘Agitated?’ says Jody, and takes a little step into the room. Dr Kadinsky makes a diffident noise in his throat. 

‘Vocalisations, rocketing heart rate. His blood pressure spiked. We think it’s best to leave them together, if it’s alright with you.’ 

Jody’s staring at the beds. It’s strange to see them like this. They look so long, like they’re lying in beds built for some race of smaller men. Sam’s feet are tensed up and curled slightly inwards, pressing against the footboard and then easing away. Press, relax, press, relax. Jody makes herself look away, back at the doctor. 

‘We found him by the bed,’ the doctor says, hesitantly. ‘There was a - there seems to have been a small fire. Incense, perhaps? It set off the fire alarm and when we got here he was, ah, he was unresponsive.’ 

Jody turns her head and looks him straight in the face. 

‘Is he in a coma? Or what?’

The doctor rubs his hand across his jaw. 

‘It’s a - it’s quite unusual. They seem to be in the same condition, in terms of their mental state - they’re unresponsive, completely so, but their, erm, they’re not what we would think of as unconscious. Their brains are still registering signs of prolonged REM activity.’ He hesitates, licks his lips. ‘It’s quite unusual.’

‘You said.’ Jody sits down in the easy chair that Dean found in a pawn shop, the kind with a foot-rest and a wooden lever that tips the whole thing back. ‘Can I sit here a little?’

When the doctor’s gone she sits and looks at them, arms folded tight across her chest. Dean’s right hand is twitching, two fingers crooked inwards, like he’s motioning someone over or signaling across a room. While she’s sitting there Sam’s breathing grows quick and harsh and then subsides again. 

She sits and listens to the steady beep of machines, watches the boys breathe and sigh and twitch under their sheets. Once Sam laughs, high and wild. Two nurses come by on rounds, padding on soft-soled shoes, and the sun goes down behind the windowblinds, cloud-smothered, a yolk drowning slow in its own milky white. Jody goes out of the room and closes the door behind her.


End file.
